Thursday, April 03, 2008

The New Pyramid Builders

A mile-high tower will rise in a desert port town, and Americans will be helping to finance its £5 billion construction cost. It will rise in the town Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, halfway up the length of the Red Sea.

At 5,250 feet, it will be twice the height of another tower being erected in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf. A few miles north up the Sea from Jeddah is Rabigh, where about 40,000 workers are constructing the world's largest petrochemical plant as part of King Abdullah Economic City, itself part of a $500 billion plan to turn Saudi Arabia into a "powerhouse" industrial giant. Other massive construction projects are underway in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries.

"By the end of the year," reported The New York Times in an article, "The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia," on January 20,

"this massive city of steel at the edge of the Red Sea will take its place as a cog of globalization: plastics produced here will be used to make televisions in Japan, cellphones in China and thousands of other products to be sold in the United States and Europe. Construction costs at the plant, which spreads over eight square miles, have doubled to $10 billion because of shortages in materials and labor. The amount of steel being used is 10 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower."

The Times article also reports that,

"Abu Dhabi is planning to spend close to $1 billion for a new museum with the help of the Louvre, in Paris. Dubai's latest grandiose idea is to build a small-scale replica of the French city of Lyon, complete with residential housing, a museum, a culinary school and a soccer club."

Americans will be helping to finance these and other massive projects in Saudi Arabia and in the Persian Gulf fiefdoms through their gas and heating oil prices. One important thing to remember about these projects is that they are not strictly "private" undertakings; every one of them is a government project. Strictly speaking, neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the other medieval kingdoms or satrapies in the Mideast has a "government," representative or otherwise.

Their legislative bodies are purely artificial fictions beholden to ruling families. The only persons who have billions to invest in these new pyramids are those related or closely connected to those ruling families. Michael Corleone's Mafia crime family pales in comparison to these Middle East oil oligarchies, which have their own tribal codes of loyalty, justice and silence, a morality that boasts its own "whacking" policy against Muslims who "rat" on Mohammed or take Allah's name in vain, or who abandon the tribe completely, and an inbred contempt for and mistrust of all non-Muslim outsiders.

A similar arrangement exists in Mainland China, in which most of the cadres of the ruling Communist Party own and control the "private enterprises" behind China's own economic boom. That arrangement is by definition fascist, and accounts for the censorship, brutal repression, and absence of any civil liberties there. In Saudi Arabia and its Islamic neighbors, the arrangement is much more primitive, and intractably religious.

Such as Prince al-Walid bin Talal, planner of the mile-high tower, who bought the prestigious Savoy Hotel in London for £1.25 billion in 2005, reports the London Daily Mail of March 31. Bin Talal is the Saudi who offered former Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check after the World Trade Center was destroyed by fellow Saudis in 2001. Giuliani promptly returned the check. Bin Talal also is an enabler of Islam in the West, building dozens of mosques in it every year and giving $20 million to Harvard and Georgetown Universities to establish schools of "Islamic studies."

One can imagine bin Talal's mile-high tower is his extravagant way of giving a Bronx cheer to the U.S., the World Trade Center, and all those who died in the attack. Two British firms, Hyder Consulting and Arup, will tackle the tower project in a joint venture with bin Talal's firm, Kingdom Holdings. One supposes that is a kind of reward to the British for wanting to de-emphasize the Holocaust and the Crusades, or not teach the subjects at all, in history lessons in the presence of British Muslim students, for allowing Islamic Sharia law to creep up to equivalence with British secular law, and for many other concessions to Muslim "sensibilities."

Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest oil exporter. "The Persian Gulf countries reaped "$1.5 trillion in oil revenue from 2002 to 2006," reports the Times article. Saudi Arabia and its religious/political rival, Iran, another oil exporter, together are the chief enablers of Islamic jihad against the West.

But vertical pyramids and other vanity projects are not the sole means employed by billionaire Arabs to engineer a hostile takeover of the West. The Times article reports that,

"Last year...a fund controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi bought a stake in Citigroup for $7.5 billion, while another run by Dubai's ruler bought a large share in Sony, the Japanese consumer electronics giant. Sabie, a major Saudi petrochemical company, bought the plastics division of General Electric for $11.6 billion, and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation bought half of Dow Chemical's commodity-plastics unit for $9.5 billion....In recent weeks, other big banks plagued by losses from the mortgage crisis, like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, have raised tens of billions of dollars from a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian funds, including ones from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia."

The American Congress for Truth reports an April 1st Human Events article, in "America for Sale to Sharia Sovereign Wealth Funds," that

"In December 2007, Bourse Dubai, the world's first and largest Islamic equity exchange, bought 20% of NASDAQ, the biggest U.S. electronic stock market, and 'rebranded' it as part of Dubai's company. The Bourse also got NASDAQ's 28% of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). In addition, Qatar acquired a 24% LSE stake, giving the two Gulf nations control over nearly 52% of the London exchange. On March 15 [2008], Iran, which now dominates the leading 100 Islamic banks - followed by Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the UAE - announced plans to list a $90 billion energy holding company on the Dubai International Financial Exchange, which is wholly owned by Bourse Dubai."

This article, incidentally, was co-authored by Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American, who was sued in a British court by Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz for writing a book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which, among other things, revealed Mahfouz's role in promoting the Islamic conquest of Britain and Europe. The British court ordered her to pay "$225,000 in damages and legal fees to Mahfouz, as well as apologize and destroy existing copies of her books," according to ACT for America on April 1st. Mahfouz is a professional libel "tourist," or terrorist who prefers to extinguish his victims with costly litigation instead of with planes or bombs on vests or in backpacks.

New York State's Court of Appeals declined to protect her from the alleged defamation suit, claiming it did not have jurisdiction over suits originating overseas, thus jeopardizing the efficacy of First Amendment freedom of speech guarantees in the U.S., while implicitly conceding that Americans could be subject to the libel and defamation laws of other nations. On March 31, the New York State legislature unanimously passed the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which deemed foreign defamation judgments null and void in New York, home of many publishers and writers. Governor David Paterson is expected to sign it into law.

Mahfouz, however, has already made significant inroads by practicing censorship by lawsuit. The most notorious instance to date was his 2007 suit against Cambridge University Press for publishing Alms for Jihad, by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, also Americans, who detailed how Islamic charities are simply money laundering fronts for terrorists. CUP, as a defendant under British libel law, had to refute the accusations and also limit itself in terms of what evidence it could employ in its defense. Rather than face a sea of Saudi petro-pounds in court costs and legal expenses, which it would probably have been ordered to reimburse Mahfouz, CUP caved in to him, withdrew the book from sale and circulation, agreed to shred all existing copies of it, asked libraries to return their copies to be destroyed, and apologized to Mahfouz.

That whole shameful episode of censorship by lawsuit by Islamic billionaires is reminiscent of the John Wilkes affair of 1763, when Wilkes, a member of the House of Commons, said that the king indeed could do wrong, and was promptly charged with libel by the government and expelled from Parliament. He fought back, however, eventually won over his enemies, and his name became synonymous with freedom of the press.

But, to return to the pyramids and the financial subornation of Western capitalism, what must be understood is that these chunks of ownership cannot be likened to investments by the Al Capone crime syndicate, nor even to a Michael Corleone-style ruse of investing a gang's takings in "legitimate" business (see "The Godfather, Part II," for that tactic), although the root causes are similar. These are aggressive moves by a united political/religious bloc, Islam, to influence the course of Western civilization by acquiring financial leverage over banks, lending institutions, major corporations and investors, and finally over Western political institutions, solely and ultimately to advance the Islamization of the West.

And, as statist regulations and controls foster the growth of organized crime at home and abroad (resulting in such programs the U.S.-directed "war" against the drug cartel in Colombia and tribal poppy-growing enterprises in Afghanistan), irrational foreign policies have fostered the growth of regimes and tyrannies fundamentally hostile to the West. Western policies permitted Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members to seize private oil producing property, and, in conjunction with that inaction, the West at home established prohibitive controls on the development of oil producing resources as part of environmental and "conservation" policies. This has resulted in the West's perilous dependency on the production whims of OPEC and the transfer of enormous wealth to those regimes and tyrannies.

As Nikita Khrushchev once promised that the Soviet Union would 'bury" the U.S. as an industrial power, Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbors are promising to bury the U.S. as a global competitor. Instead of demanding that it acknowledge the "superiority" of communism, they will require that the U.S. become a deferential handmaiden of Islam, if not an Islamic province itself.

Of course, all those billion dollar projects are undertaken on the premise that the U.S. and the West will not commit economic suicide by "going green" or by becoming fascist, that they will remain viable, productive realms. If the U.S experiences an economic collapse, the Treasury notes, mutual funds and other government instruments held by Mideast financiers will be as worthless as the ones owned by private American investors and speculators.

Ancient Egyptian kings and pharaohs built over ninety pyramids to house them at death. The new pyramid builders seek to bury the corpse of the West in their own. No one should doubt that Islam - including its kings, emirs, princes, mullahs, imams, its billionaires, its countless mind-stunted manqués, and its homicidal killers - wishes to eviscerate the West, and especially the U.S.

The U.S. and the West should act now to ensure that those mile-high towers, high- rises, and plants remain empty monuments to larcenous vanity, by rediscovering the necessary virtues of self-preservation and self-interest.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Ed,

I am glad you wrote on this subject. I have been noticing over the years all the Saudi money that has been thrown around buying Western businesses. The Saudis bought the Plaza Hotel in New York and when you walk by it and look at all the flags that it flies, you will see that there is no flag of Israel. If I could afford to stay there, I wouldn't.

A question though; do you think that it should be illegal for American firms to sell their assets to Saudis and other hostile Arabs based on national security grounds? I know that the libertarians would scream bloody murder but there understanding of rights is rationalistic. I remember debating this question when that Dubai company wanted to buy the company that manages US port security. To me that would have been like allowing the Nazis to manage port security during WW2.

Lastly, something off topic. But have you been watching the John Adams miniseries on HBO? I would love to know your opinion of it.

Thanks. Also thanks for letting me know that the venerable Plaza Hotel is no longer venerable. I'd always wanted to stay there, to follow in the footsteps of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, but if it's owned by former goat herders, no way.

About your question concerning whether or not it should be illegal for American firms to sell their assets to the Arabs: Yes, I think it should be, since we are technically at war with them and their ideology (though, to go by the vacuous rhetoric of Obama, Clinton and McCain, Islam and Islamofacisism has nothing to do with anything, we wouldn't want to slur Allah-fearing Muslims, you know). Yes, the libertarians would scream bloody murder but they're as clueless as the presidential candidates. Yes, allowing the exponents of a hostile political/religious ideology buy up interests and property in the U.S. is unarguably detrimental to the preservation of the U.S. as a nominally free country, akin to allowing the Nazis manage port security during WWII because they're so damned "efficient" and "meticulous." But the argument wouldn't go over well with Bush or Clinton or anyone else, because Bush didn't declare war, didn't ask Congress for a declaration of war, not even against the wrong enemy (Iraq, it should have been Saudi Arabia and Iran), so the issue is in a moral purgatory, where everything is really nothing. We wouldn't have any national security issues if we'd taken out Iran and Saudi Arabia in the beginning. So, the crisis has festered from a mere boil to a cancer. Ed

I forgot to answer your question: I've only seen snipets of the Adams/HBO series, and that was at a Colonial Williamsburg booksigning. It looks like a fair production, and I was surprised that so much footage was devoted to the debates between Adams and others. On the other hand, much of it is too "realistic" -- that is, unnecessarily gruesome (chopped off limbs, the tar and feathering, etc.) I don't get HBO so I'm missing out on it. Ed